The invention relates to data storage systems, and in particular, to data storage systems with remote data mirroring capability.
Given the importance of the availability of information, several techniques have been developed for providing enhanced reliability and availability of data stored in a data storage system. Once such technique is data mirroring. In a “mirrored” system, the data stored on one data storage system is replicated on another data storage system. Thus, if one or more storage devices on one of the data storage systems fails, or a catastrophic system failure should occur, the data is readily available in the form of a mirrored copy from the mirrored data storage system.
Devices on a data storage system (or source) that are mirrored on the same remote, data storage system (or target) are referred to as a device group. Likewise, devices on the target that serve or mirror devices on the same source are referred to as a device group. Device groups are used, for example, to insure the consistency of blocks of data too large to be stored in a single area, during planned or unplanned interruptions such as link failures or planned back-ups. Device groups typically span a number of physical and logical volumes, and, in some instances, as when data striping is used, several device groups may be mapped to different portions of a physical or logical volume.
Typically, the source and target device groups are arranged as pairs on any two systems and each source/target device group pair is connected by two dedicated links (e.g., ESCON or Fibre Channel links), one for supporting writes during data backup operations and reads during data recovery operations, and the other for redundancy. Thus, a redundant arrangement of N data storage systems in which each data storage system is capable of supporting a mirrored configuration involving each of the N−1 other remote data storage systems requires N*(N−1) physical links, or an average of 2*(N−1) physical links per system. This link requirement becomes impractical when N>3, as the number of ports on the data storage system is limited.